Kasama College of Education

Items

• Mental Wellness and the Socio-Spatial Condition of Black Communities
  Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania has received the designation of “Most Livable City” despite widespread structural inequities that harm marginalized people, making it one of the worst cities in the country for Black women. This stark contrast reveals a tale of two Pittsburghs, in which race and class have a significant bearing on health, educational, and economic outcomes. These inequities are rendered in the built environment. Structural racism, historic urban planning and policy decisions, and the post-industrial context have contributed to the creation of an apartheid condition in which environmental stressors negatively impact Black residents’ mental health. Utilizing Pittsburgh as a case study, this thesis proposes a methodology to analyze the linkages between race, the built environment, and community mental health. Building on radical mental health frameworks, such as healing justice, this thesis suggests alternative approaches to urban planning in order to cultivate spaces that are liberatory, caring, mutually affirming, and just.
• What is the huachicol-scape? —Navigating the multiple identities, landscapes, and architectures of an ecology of stolen gasoline
  This project used Harvard Graduate School of Design tools and resources to treat fuel theft as an object of study through three frames: 1) politico-economic, 2) socio-environmental, and 3) historic-spatial. Following the tradition of urbanists looking at conditions that do not fit our current frameworks, these proposed frames aim to document and thickly describe the unique spatial, socio-economic, political, and environmental structures enabling an informal gasoline supply chain in central Mexico. The goal is to use traditional architectural tools (diagrams, plans, sections, elevations) to reveal the 1) symbiosis between gasoline theft, the state, and private capital, 2) how this symbiosis materializes into the built environment, and 3) how ecologically entangled these urban types are into the landscape. With more than 60% of the population actively participating in the informal economy, in Mexico, "informality" is the most accessible mechanism for providing livelihood, income, and service development, especially for disenfranchised populations. Fuel theft, known in Spanish as huachicoleo (pronounced "watchy-coh-leh-oh"), have exponentially increased since the introduction of NAFTA, today representing an annual market of 3 billion dollars. Despite existing socio-economic studies regarding petroleum’s role and impacts, what is the role of space as an agent in shaping the environment that oil — and in this case, the state (or Pemex)— has made possible? This work contributes as a disciplinary critique towards traditional economic and urban formal-informal dualisms by introducing an alternative state-enabled and controlled informality that is not just vernacular but also corresponds to a particular political-economic shift.
• Tracing Architectural Authorship through the Archive of Indian Modernist Achyut Kanvinde
  Independence from British rule for several colonies was not just a political and ideological phenomenon, but also spatially articulated through modernism. In India, the adoption of the International style was symbolic of a shedding of identity tied to a colonial past. Nehru, often lauded as the “architect” of modern India for his development of science and technology in a bid to catch up to the modern west, sent young professionals abroad for further studies to America and England. They were to be tasked with rebuilding a new, “modern” nation on returning. One such architect was A. P. Kanvinde, who studied at Harvard under the instruction of Walter Gropius in 1946. This thesis positions itself in the growing body of work that attempts to subvert the west-dominated canonical reading of modernism, instead trying to bring in counter-narratives from the third world. In looking at Kanvinde’s work, it examines architecture and authorship, not just through the development of style and quest for an “Indian” identity, but also through questioning the trope of the architects as heroic figures and asking if they can truly be sole authors. Works of architecture come out of a process of collaboration, and are implicitly shaped by socio-political context, and by constraints such as site, climate, and budget. These inquiries into the process of architectural production are made through the project of the National Science Centre, New Delhi. This thesis deals with the twofold theoretical problems of an incomplete archive and proximity to subject matter, by reexamining the accepted way of conceiving of and writing history, to instead include personal oral histories and written correspondence to supplement the material archive of written works and architectural drawings.
• Embedding Transience in Permanence: The School Pandemically Reconsidered
  The greatest catastrophic threat cities face today is not nuclear weapons but viruses. The intention of the project is to rethink the way cities can be prepared for future pandemic crisis in terms of architecture. Fusing the similar spatial organizations of a school and a pandemic hospital, the project proposes a new type that functions as both, asynchronously. The new type is capable of adapting to the needs of a health crisis by temporarily shutting down the education program and facilitating remote learning to make space for a pandemic hospital. The thesis combines the permanent but flexible idea of type with the transient idea of rapid expansion/contraction to adapt to the sudden but temporary need for an enormously increased amount of hospital space in the city. Through systems of circulation and modularity, the built form is able to convert, expand, and contract according to the requirements of its alternating programs. New spatial opportunities for both the school and the hospital are also created by the integrated systems that eases of the transition. The sites of the hypothesis are located in Beijing, the densely populated political center of China. By embedding the emergency healthcare infrastructure within the city rather than relegating it to peripheral locations, the proposal aims to have a significant impact on the city, both socially and morphologically.
• Subject-Object Ambivalence: An Archival Institution
  The project of Subject-Object Ambivalence is to design a cultural institution which privileges, and spatializes, Blackness. In this new vision of cultural space, individuals occupy both the subject and object positions. The simultaneous awareness of being seen by others as an object, while occupying a racialized subjectivity, is a dissonant reality of the Black experience in America. In his seminal 1903 work "The Souls of Black Folk," W. E. B. Du Bois referred to this dissonant reality as “double-consciousness,” the “veil,” or, more simply, “two-ness.” Occupying a place to both see and be seen, as Tony Bennett writes, collapses the disconnected experiences of either being a subject who sees or being an object that is seen. The resulting ambivalence — of being both a subject and object — is the exact experience of two-ness Du Bois speaks to and Black people experience. My project posits that providing a subject-object experience in an institutional context actively subverts and dismantles the traditional hierarchy, power, and distance imposed by institutions through time. What results is a framework for rethinking institutions and challenging the dominant paradigm of the production of knowledge and culture.
• The Channel is a Garden: Radical tools for a just transition on the Houston Ship Channel
  As global economies transition from fossil fuels, landscape architecture serves as a means of futuring the post-fossil environment. This thesis draws from ecological urbanism, degrowth, and climate justice to speculate on a just transition scenario for the Houston Ship Channel. It aims to answer the questions: What would a just transition along the Houston Ship Channel entail? How can landscape architecture renew a commitment to justice? While the Channel facilitates regional prosperity, it has proved to be a trans-scalar detriment to ecological and public health. The San Jacinto Monument, a colossal obelisk on the Channel mouth marking Texas’ independence, symbolizes this contemporary hubris. This thesis proposes a landscape intervention at the Monument as a staging ground for a landscape-driven drawdown of fossil industries along the Channel. The work addresses Houston community organizations and climate activists, and contributes to the futuring of contaminated soils, renewable energy, and the just transition.
• Mendenhall in Motion: Inscribing Glacial Time and Animating Ecological Thresholds
  Sited in Juneau, Alaska, this project interrogates the aging tourist infrastructure surrounding Mendenhall Valley’s retreating glacier and proposes novel modes of access and interaction. Mendenhall Valley’s existing agenda of visitation dilutes landscape through staged, distanced, and static encounters. This approach to landscape engagement has perpetuated a detrimental culture of visual consumption and results in image-centric encounters devoid of haptic intimacy. As glaciers retreat, they inscribe a legible succession of interactions between bedrock, ice, water, soil, and plants. The proposed visitor experience strives for ecological comprehension through tactile encounters that prioritize discovery, movement, and material accessibility. Several designed interventions enable haptic engagement with the variety of ecological processes occurring within and around Mendenhall Glacier. By reorganizing tourist infrastructure and expanding local research institutions, this project strives to create narrative material compositions and interrogate relationships between viewer and viewed.
• Equity and Climate Change Adaptation: Toward a Better Understanding of Resource Allocation
  With climate change adaptation becoming ever more urgent, decisions about how to allocate adaptation resources have become increasingly important. For instance, should decision-makers in flood-prone areas fund a sea wall to protect a larger community, provide subsidies to property owners to raise minimum floor heights to avoid flooding, or consider relocating a neighborhood to accommodate increased river discharges? Making these choices means evaluating and prioritizing potential responses to climate risks and understanding how they will impact communities living in these vulnerable areas. Though questions of who benefits and who is burdened apply to all public policy decisions, climate change adaptation forms a particularly challenging context due to its conditions of high urgency, existential threat, deep uncertainty, conflicting notions of justice and stakeholders’ valuation of risk and prioritization of objectives. This doctoral research investigates how local governmental bodies are making decisions on resource allocation to address flood risk in the context of climate change adaptation and in what ways they take into account social equity in their adaptation responses. Through plan analysis of adaptation plans in the United States and the Netherlands and two in-depth case studies of the flood-prone urban regions of Houston, TX and Rotterdam in the Netherlands, I develop a set of lessons learned on equitable climate change adaptation. These lessons learned include the need for political and administrative commitment at all levels of decision-making; the effectiveness of an explicit and formal framework for equity consideration; the role of inclusive stakeholder engagement; the need for a broad and dynamic understanding of social vulnerability; the role of data in countering systemic injustice; the importance of trust, accountability, transparency and recognition of historical marginalization and injustice; and opportunities for a comprehensive assessment of benefits and costs of adaptation measures.
• An Attempt to Approach a Ceiling
  “You sleep… with your eyes wide open. You count and you organize the cracks in the ceiling. The conjunction of shadows and stains, and the variation of adjustment and orientation of your gaze, produce effortlessly, slowly, dozens of nascent shapes, fragile coalitions that you are able to grasp only for a fleeting second…”* You don’t think of the ceiling often. Your body, upright, walks along plans and look at spaces in elevation. You design for circulation, for interaction, for uprightness. But, at times, you reorient yourself to upend uprightness. You lay down. Now, the ceiling is your elevation. Your movement is relegated to your eyes, which graze the surface of the ceiling, imagining what is beyond it. Below its concealment, below its labyrinthine textures, below the plaster, you seek direction and a definition of space. This thesis is an attempt to approach the infraordinary: the background of everyday life, which writer Georges Perec asks us to question. You find the infraordinary in the cracks of the ceiling, where you can look below it, and find a labyrinth to explore with none less than the ceiling itself as a compass rose. *: Georges Perec, “A Man Asleep,” in Things: A Story of the Sixties; A Man Asleep, trans. Andrew Leak (1967; repr., Boston: Verba Mundi, 2004).
• Project for a Model, Sacramento: Waste Objecthood, Indeterminacy, and the As-found
  Insofar as architecture can be considered a medium at all, it is a medium first and foremost of preformed material objects, objects with histories of their own. This thesis seeks to develop an alternative environmental aesthetics for architecture in working through the scalar problems inherent to using as-found waste objects as both building materials and modeling materials. The studies completed as part of the project endeavor to move away from the standardized abstraction of commodity materials (which the modern architect is assumed to treat as a kind of translational medium through which to project absolute ideas of abstract space) and instead towards the messily contingent specifics of as-found objecthood. Three primary indeterminate qualities characterize found waste objects: formal indeterminacy, tectonic indeterminacy, and scalar indeterminacy. The project aims to develop a methodology for working with these kinds of indeterminacy through architectural scale models.
• The British new towns: lessons for the world from the new-town experiment
  For more than a century the idea of building new towns has captured the imagination of urban planners. Britain has been a centre of both theory and practice, particularly in the early years of the planned-town idea and in the golden period of new-town development from the Second World War to the middle of the 1970s (Forsyth and Peiser, 2020; Wakeman, 2016). While in the last decades of the twentieth century such developments became less common globally, a recent resurgence of activity in Asia, and increasingly elsewhere, has brought new attention to the type. Even the UK has announced a new round of garden-style developments (UK Ministry of Housing, Communities, and Local Government, 2018; National Health Service England, 2018).
• Loft living in Hangzhou: fitting in an inclusive and affordable practice
  Loft living in Hangzhou, while sharing a similar name with its western counterpart, comprises a type of residential unit with unique spatial and cultural features that correspond with Chinese fast development and societal changes. The thesis argues that living in lofts in Hangzhou is driven by more than fashion; instead, the typology of loft living indicates the swift ever-changing demographic, cultural, economic, and urban patterns of major Chinese cities in recent decades. In a hyper-competitive, hyper-stressed city, loft living offers a more inclusive and affordable practice that not only helps immigrants from outside the city overcome the hukou barriers to becoming an urban house-owner but also provides pedestrian-based spatial amenities that make the traditional/modern disjuncture visible in the urban fabric and contrasts with the now conventional gated residential communities; loft living allows “non-conformists,” the unmarried, and the “creative class” to live better in the cities in their preferred lifestyles that challenge the traditional core family values. The thesis suggests that the city planners should acknowledge the rising diversity among the public and consider planning a gender-conscious and inclusive cityscape that embraces various housing types to accommodate diverse lifestyles.
• Raindrop Prelude
  Modernism drew hard lines to distinguish between human, nature, and machine, three key players forming where we live and what we use as tools. Being the sole agents, humans have utilized nature and machine as entities forming a rigid trichotomy. But with the advance of technology, including ChatGPT, the boundaries have evolved and will further evolve to be dissolved in many fields. While modernism still dominates in architecture with strict division, this thesis questions how architecture may work and what activity or logic could be introduced if a porous framework applies to it. It imagines the potential of a building for machines, a data center, to experiment with such a framework and explores the potential of the data center to also be used for humans, incorporating the conceptual logic of nature for its spatial organization. In this way, a highly comprehensive ecology of human, nature, and machine can be achieved, intertwining three different systems to coincide in the same mechanism. The data center is a warehouse for machines arranged in an extremely efficient grid system. Together with layers of hallways for security and white background noise, it creates a transcendental atmosphere suitable for meditation; a gradual process to reach emotional and mental stability. Once a dispersed mind goes through the process and reaches its stability, it disappears as moisture condenses to fog, and to clouds, becoming nothing again by falling down. Thus, spaces are sequenced and layered with increasing spatial density till one reaches the cloud in the center, where the machines are. One travels through spaces as a water droplet journeys to be a raindrop. It is a story before a raindrop—a raindrop prelude.
• Making Green Work: Implementation Strategies in a New Generation of Urban Forests
  The concept of “urban forest” (UF) is gaining momentum in urban planning in the context of climate adaptation. Principles from the field of urban forestry are mainstreamed into urban planning, but little is known about effective tools for the successful implementation of new UFs. This article presents explorative research comparing how three cities (Almere, Madrid, and Boston) are dealing with the planning of a UF project, and their alignment with distinct organisational and typological interpretations of a UF. We employed a mixed-methods approach to gain insights into the main goals of the project, their organisational structure, and the employed planning process through the analysis of project documents and expert interviews. Our results point to an effective mainstreaming of environmental questions among stakeholders, but also indicate a poor development of objective criteria for the success of a UF. We note that municipal planners circumvented current internal rigidities and barriers by relying on intermediaries and local academia as providers of external knowledge, or by facilitating experiments. Finally, our results show that there may not be just one UF type to achieve the desired environmental and social goals and overcome implementation barriers. Conversely, each of the governance and organisational models behind the implementation of each type present collaborative and mainstreaming challenges. Therefore, we see an opportunity in further research examining processes and institutions towards the collaborative building of UFs that could bridge gaps between top-down and bottom-up approaches and activate different types of agencies.
• Sweating Building: A Study of Self-Cooling Hydrogels for Application in Adaptive Architecture
  Hydrogels that are responsive to changing environments could have applications in passive cooling and indoor air temperature control for buildings. Most of the current studies of these applications are still experimental and remain on small-scale. In this thesis, I propose a self-cooling roof module that makes use of single network hydrogel with polyester-foam as structure (SN-Gel-FoS). In a climate like the one in Abu Dhabi, these roof modules would absorb moisture from the indoor air, reducing latent heat from the atmosphere during the nights, and release water via phase separation, cooling the air of the interior environment during the day. The SN-Gel-FoS demonstrates much higher tensile and compressive strength and less deformation after multiple cycles, compared to other SN-Gels. In this thesis, I adopted SN-Gel-FoS for a design proposal for 16 meters wide, 160 meters long farm school. There are 4328 square meters of 5-cm-thick SN-Gel-FoS embedded in the flat roof of this building. By supplying air through this composite roof, we can provide enough cooling for this building without any active heat exchanger or heat pump. This passive cooling method could reduce the operational energy consumption of this institution by more than 75%. At the same time, this translucent layer of hydrogel also provides ideal ambient lighting and unique spatial experience for its inhabitants, which includes children, teachers, and different types of farm animals.
• Enactive Genesis: Toward Generative Architecture with Human-Centric Artificial Intelligence
  Artificial intelligence (AI) algorithms are gaining increasing popularity in the domain of architecture, urban design, and landscape architecture. However, most of recent generative design workflows using image-based AI such as generative adversarial neural networks do not incorporate human-centric evaluation metrics and are prone to potential bias embedded in the dataset researchers used to train AI agents. Moreover, the outcomes of such approaches are pixelated images that are not directly useable in real world scenarios. Inspired by enactive learning in developmental psychology, the machine learning community has developed increasingly powerful AI agents that learn emergent behavior through unsupervised and reinforcement learning approaches such as self-play or actor-critic that do not rely on human heuristic datasets. Therefore, I propose Enactive Genesis, a novel environment to train generative architecture AI agents through reinforcement learning and human-centric evaluation metrics. The environment is composed of three open-source Software Development Kits (SDK), each comprising a novel and foundational infrastructure towards general and human-centric AI in generative architecture design: 1. BIMGen: An open-source SDK that researchers could leverage to create generic architectural designs using a universal BIM grammar. 2. Promenader: An open-source SDK game engine asset that uses phenomenology as an explicit evaluation criteria for architecture design. We implement accessibility and phenomenal transparency as numeric evaluation metrics in an embodied architecture simulation. 3. EnGen: An open-source SDK for training intelligent agents to generate and modify grammar in component 1 according to human-centric evaluation metrics in component 2. EnGen allows user to perform enactive learning, using the generation system from step1, and the human-centric evaluation metrics from step 2 as loss function for artificial neural networks. With EnGen, AI agents can gradually learn emergent strategy for generating an architectural space that has high accessibility and phenomenal transparency value.
• Products of its Circumstance: Homegrown Housing
  My thesis, "Products of its Circumstance: Homegrown Housing," addresses the intricate layers of a teeming, congested conurbation of sixteen cities collectively known as Metro Manila -a megalopolis shaped by 350 years of Spanish Colonialism, 50 years of American colonialism, generations of intensive rural to urban migration, and rapid privately driven urban development (virtually unchecked by government oversight), each of which has contributed to a more than century-long housing crisis. Private developers' proht-driven models routinely sever connections between citizens and their cities, often sacrihcing substance for spectacle. This project navigates the challenges of this urban condition, recognizing every citizen's right to safe and adequate housing. This thesis, an architectural response to the complex circumstances shaping Philippine Urbanism, began as an exploration of found objects and personal curiosities that in themselves embody and thus illuminate the close relationship between Philippine culture and the built environment. This study provoked an architectural response: a vital infrastructure that serves as armor and trellis, a design approach that takes its cues from established patterns of collective living, while catering to a persistent desire for greater personal security. By catering to the housing needs of marginalized groups, this infrastructure emerges as a catalyzing force, balancing cultural values and safeguarding a fiercely protected core of communal living against the post-modern city's pressing forces of fragmentation. It is also a potential exemplar of a homegrown urban Filipino residence, marking a significant step towards an inward-looking and locally spirited dwelling.
• Spatialisation of Conflict in Ayodhya: Urban Shifts in Post Babri Masjid Era
  The demolition of the Babri Masjid in Ayodhya remains a pivotal moment in modern Indian history. Against a backdrop of mounting communal tensions nationwide, this town continues to serve as the focal point for discussions on democracy, secularism, and communal harmony in the country. This thesis explores the complex dynamics of communal conflict in post-Babri Masjid Ayodhya. By identifying the factors fueling communal tensions and deconstructing their spatial dimensions, the study analyzes how urbanization amplifies the likelihood of communal conflict occurrences. The thesis offers a framework to foster social resilience in a once-agrarian town that is now rapidly urbanizing under political pressures. By redesigning a section of Ayodhya, this thesis aims to create replicable urban design strategies that promote social cohesion and reduce risks of future conflicts in a communally charged urban landscape.
• PLANTATION FUTURES: Foregrounding Lost Narratives
  Oak Alley Plantation, located in Louisiana, is preserved as a master narrative: a cultural heritage landscape reflecting the values and cultures of the Antebellum era. Reconstructed cabins in the rear of the property stand as the only recognition and acknowledgment of the forged Black landscapes used for refuge, joy, and resistance The thesis critically engages in the plantation as a landscape system of white supremacy that linked the exploitation of racialized bodies and fertile lands to commodities. Moments for accountability and restoration are conceived, such as the Citizen Assembly, which holds industry and systems of dispossession to account through new forms of democratic processes and landscape-based evidence collection. Through the layering of archival narratives, poetry, literature, and drawing, Black ecologies emerge on site, foregrounding lost narratives within the plantation. These narratives envision radically different futures, where interspecies kinship and empathy surface as new ecologies that point to new Black futurities.
• Geminate Forms for Social Supports
  The severity of Boston’s addiction crisis can largely be attributed to the closure of the city’s public health campus on Long Island (Boston Harbor) in 2014. This project proposes to dispense with the ineffective and superannuated model of centralized addiction treatment embodied at Long Island and instead design a series of interventions across greater Boston that complete a continuum of care for those struggling with addiction, to be built using public funds won in lawsuits against drug companies. Reviving the discourse of typology, each intervention will provide a spectrum of services while acting as a node of the network. This approach embodies the harm reduction principle of “meeting people where they are,” both in terms of their addiction and their physical location. The Long Island campus will persist in the re-use of its bricks in the interventions, which will be a mixture of new buildings and additions to existing facilities.
• Understanding Design Responsibility in Human Health: A Case-Study Approach for Evaluating Sunlight Use in Chilean Public Housing and Its Lack of Design Variability
  Given the importance of sunlight on human health and how the built environment influences human interaction with sunlight, does the design of public housing in Chile address the country’s large geographic variation in order to incorporate sunlight more robustly into its design? To answer this question I look at the last thirty years of Chilean public housing development. Chile's geography spans a North to South length of 4,270 km (2,653 mi) and has an average sunshine variation that more than doubles between the northernmost city of Arica compared to the southernmost city of Punta Arenas. In addition, in the last thirty years Chile has built over 1,250,000 public houses having with these provided homes for close to a third of its total population (27.8%). The first part of this thesis takes a close look at the medical research that studies the consequences of sunlight on health and uses this information, along with existing design recommendations to create an assessment framework through which to evaluate public housing developments in the field. The second part focuses in unraveling the historical precedents that led to the current typology, so prevalent in Chilean public housing projects today.
• Public-Private Partnerships for Affordable Housing in Brazil: Promises and Pitfalls
  This thesis examines the adoption of Public-Private Partnerships (P3s) in the delivery of affordable housing in Brazil. Using as a case study São Paulo’s Casa Paulista Program, the country’s first P3 for affordable housing, it investigates the shifting role of government in housing and space production, moving away from development to serving as a facilitator. It documents and critically assesses changes and continuities in affordable housing governance, and details the rising conflicts between state, market, and civil society actors. Findings show that PPPs have failed in their central ambition of leveraging private capital, in scaling up production, and have excluded citizens from engaging in policy decision-making. It concludes by proposing special attention to planners and public authorities of specificities of space and time in the implementation of universal planning ideas.
• Yamanashi Now: From Iconic Relic to Urban Incubator
  In 1966, Kenzo Tange devised a powerful apparatus of disseminating mass media, Yamanashi Broadcasting and Press Center. A concrete innovation and an urban fragment, the Yamanashi Building applied the joint-core system that could fulfill his imagination of an indefinitely intensified production environment at an urban center. Nonetheless, Tange could neither foresee social challenges, such as a sinking economy and aging society, nor could he realize the fragile nature of mass media. His efforts of self-containing a monochrome production service inside a monolithic structure led the Yamanashi Building, like many other concrete urban renewal buildings during the postwar era, to quickly derail from its original metabolism projection. This thesis attempts to adapt the existing concrete structure to reengage with the contemporary social and urban context. The rehybridization of the production-centric program, through reintroducing a lifestyle of production, living, and consumption, reinstates the visibility and dynamics of production. Aiming to reactivate the building vertically, the proposal challenges the construction of servant space, decentralizing the structure through liberating circulation and redefining the boundary of public and private. By occupying the surface of structure, the intervention creates a transparency that contrasts with the historical image at multiple scales, attracting a population of diverse ages. At an urban scale, the adaptation physically and programmatically mediates the institutional scale urban renewal and adjacent neighborhood, reinvigorating vacant blocks. Once an iconic urban concrete relic, the Yamanashi Building becomes an urban incubator that celebrates the history of production with a contemporary fashion.
• Afterlife of the Grande Arche: Re-materializing Digital Artifacts
  The thesis project envisions how architecture is being transformed and represented in a hyper-digital age. It is quite fascinating to me that today we have found numerous ways to digitally access and interact with architecture, without the need to physically enter the space. It seems that we’ve only been focusing on how our experience with architecture is shaped by digital technologies, but there’s very little discussion around how existing architecture is being altered through digital operations. With the evolution of cyberspace and the digitization of material culture, architecture becomes liquified, ambiguous and multitudinous. Using the iconic Grande Arche de la Defense in Paris as its site, the thesis project questions what constitutes the preconceived permanence and endurance of monumental built structures, and whether these assumptions still remain valid in a digital environment. The project begins with speculative propositions that undermine existing assumptions about monuments. It follows an iterative process that constantly goes back and forth between digitization and re-materialization of architecture. It is essentially a provocation about a future scenario, an architectural imagination on how monuments survive physical death in the form of digital reincarnation.
• The Analogous New Block
  No place ever has an absolute existence, a place is invented through the drawing of boundaries. The thesis illustrates the dual face of the intangible border crossing. From the authority’s point of view, the community is reconnected through the completion of the urban blocks. it heals the scar from its colonial past while suggesting a prosperous and utopian city’s future. The repleted block can be read as a form of erasure, paradoxically, through the presence of the urban fabric where it becomes a palimpsest of the disappearance. The community center represents a terra incognita between the two domains, resisting the disappearance of the disappearance. Where it reveals the underlying question about the city existence other than the soil that it is sitting on. Boundary Street was a former borderline that sit between the Qing Territory and British Kowloon Peninsula. The city, other than its name, was nowhere to be found. Although the physical boundary no longer subsists, the void remains as the demarcation of both the existence and disappearance. The community center is formed by a 232 meters long structure that fill up the void space between the blocks. The programs are located inside the adjacent existing buildings while the added premise is left uninterrupted, program-less and uncertain. It is a border that sits between buildings and the street, the ordinary and the peculiar, reacting to the surrounding activities. It is a public realm yet being voluntarily and involuntarily monitored.